A losing record worth $1.4 mil

In my next career, I want to be a college-football coach. About the only thing better than becoming a college-football coach, I figure, would be to become a college-football coach with a losing record.

Then, you don't even have to take the field on Saturdays to score your million(s).

The ranks of Arizona's unemployed went up by one on Monday, when the University of Arizona gave the old heave-ho to its football coach, Mike Stoops.

Turns out winning only one of your last 11 football games - against powerhouse Northern Arizona University - is not the key to the Hall of Fame.

But it'll still open a few gilt-edged doors.

Stoops walks away with a parting gift of $1.4 million. Fielding a lousy football team is not considered "cause" to fire a coach, it seems, so the university must pay him half of the remaining value of his contract.

"It shows you how out of whack those contracts are," retired Sen. Dennis DeConcini told me. DeConcini is a member of the Board of Regents and the only one to vote against Stoops' contract two years ago.

Still aglow from its first winning season in 10 years and a victory in the Las Vegas Bowl in 2008, UA asked the regents to extend Stoops' contract in 2009, never mind that it still had three years to run.

While universities were freezing pay and laying off employees, Stoops scored a 31 percent raise in his base pay, to $1 million, with a $100,000 raise every year through 2013 and potential bonuses of up to $650,000 annually.

And even that didn't make him the highest-paid coach in the state.

In fact, Stoops looks like a pauper compared with the princely sums ceded to some of these football sages.

While Stoops' university-paid salary was $1.1 million and Dennis Erickson pulls in $1.5 million from ASU, Alabama's Nick Saban is making $5.16 million. Texas' Mack Brown gets $5.1 million and Les Miles at Louisiana State is paid $3.75 million.

That's before bonuses and added pay coming from non- university sources.

If you think it's a tad over the top, you're not alone.

More than 85 percent of Division I-A university presidents surveyed in 2009 said compensation was "excessive" for football and basketball coaches, according to the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics.

Rocketing salaries for coaches was seen as the single largest contributing factor to the unsustainable growth in spending on athletics.

They just didn't think there was much they could do about it. Neither does the NCAA. The courts have ruled that universities can pay coaches whatever they want. Which, in the Southeastern Conference, is an astonishingly fat wad of cash.

"It's out of control," said Fred DuVal, chairman of the Board of Regents.

So, what would it take to get salaries under control?

"Basically, it would require a blood oath of self-restraint," DuVal told me. "That quickly failed in places like Alabama and Texas."

So, because they are out of their minds, the rest of us must follow along and jump out of ours, offering whatever it takes in our quest for pigskin glory and a spot on ESPN. To do otherwise would be to risk being seen as a loser football school, which is apparently synonymous with being seen as a loser school.

And so, Stoops departs with a 41-50 record and $1.4 million in his back pocket.

"The amount of revenue involved in a winning program versus a losing program is so enormous that we've made the determination that the overall net financial case for making the change is compelling," DuVal said.

DuVal said it's not yet clear whether Stoops will be paid out of university funds or from the school's charitable foundation.

Tom Duddleson, UA sports- information director, said the money will come from the self-funded athletic budget, noting that no public funds would be used. How he figures that ticket and TV revenues that flow into the university's athletic budget isn't public money is beyond me.

But it's a moot point because we will give this guy more than a million dollars not to coach, just as we will present his replacement with an even sweeter deal.

The shocker isn't that Stoops is walking away with $1.4 million. It's that we - who willingly pay whatever it takes to win - didn't give him more.